Yvette Janine Jackson: This is Radio Opera

Yvette Janine Jackson will present an evening of narrative soundscape compositions, including Invisible People (A Radio Opera) and Swan. Yvette’s music merges text-sound composition, chamber music, and electroacoustic techniques into through-composed and improvisatory forms that often draw from history to examine relevant social issues.

Invisible People was created after Barack Obama approved marriage equality in the United States and received backlash from several African American community leaders. At the same time, multiple blogs attempted to bring awareness to the numerous anti-gay hate crimes against black women that had received inadequate attention from mainstream media. From these events, Invisible People was born.

Swan, a journey told in 3 scenes, begins with the Middle Passage of Africans to the Americas. Yvette’s style developed while studying at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in the 1990s and was subsequently influenced by being a composer and sound designer for theatre and radio drama. She was featured in the Sveriges Radio series How sweet the sound – Afroamerikaner och konstmusik, and is a guest composer at Elektronmusikstudion (EMS).

Yvette Janine Jackson, Los Angeles born, is a composer, sound designer, and researcher who creates narrative soundscape composition for concert performance, theatre, and installation. Her long-form works often draw from history and examine relevant social issues as exemplified in Vernaculus I and Vernaculus II, sonic expressions of the catastrophic Middle Passage of Africans to the Americas, performed by Mark Dresser’s Bass Ensemble and Anthony Davis’s Improvisation Ensemble, respectively. Her experience producing radio drama is manifest in her acousmatic compositions Invisible People (A Radio Opera), a sonic exploration of homophobia within African American communities, and A Thin Line (A New Radio Opera).